hen she had planted
George Tanqueray on an infatuated editor.

She had saved it then, and of course she could save it now. It wasn't
for nothing that she had been celebrated all these years. And it wasn't
for nothing that Hugh, poor dear, had been an angel, refusing all these
years to take a penny of her earnings for the house. He hadn't married
her for that. And there they were, her earnings, diminished by some
advances to her father's impecunious family, and by some extravagances
of her own, but still swollen by much saving to a sum more than
sufficient to buy Louis out.

Her genius, after all, was a valuable asset.

She lay in bed, embracing that thought, and drawing strength from it.

Before she was well enough to go out she went and confronted Louis in
his office.

Levine was human. He always had been; and he was moved by the sight of
his pale sister-in-law, risen from her bed, dangerously, to do this
thing. He was not hard on her. He suffered himself to be bought out for
a sum less than she offered a sum that no more than recouped him for his
losses. He didn't want, he said, to make money out of the thing, he only
wanted not to lose. He was glad to be quit of it.

Brodrick was very tender to her when, lying in bed again, recovering
from her rash adventure, she told him what she had done. But she divined
under his tenderness an acute embarrassment; she could see that he
wished she hadn't done it, and wished it not only for her sake but for
his own. She could see that she had not, in nineteen-eight, repeated the
glorious success of nineteen-three. The deed he thought so adorable when
she did it in the innocence of her unwedded will, he regarded somehow as
impermissible in his wife. Then, by its sheer extravagance, it was
flattering to his male pride; now, by the same conspicuous quality, it
was not. As for his family, it was clear that they condemned the
transaction as an unjustifiable and fantastic folly. Brodrick was not
sure that he did not count it as one of the disasters of nineteen-eight.

The year was thick with them. There was Jane's collapse. Jane, by a
natural perversity had chosen nineteen-eight, of all years, to write a
book in. She had begun the work in the spring and had broken down with
the first effort.

There was not only Jane; there was Jane's child, so lamentably unlike a
Brodrick. The shedding of his first crop of hair was followed by a
darker down, revealing Jane. Not that anybody could